In the 1980s, new advances in food processing technology and transportation brought innovative products to households that enhanced the repertoire of busy homemakers: Boboli readymade pizza crusts, salad in a bag, and microwave popcorn. To keep up, American restaurants experimented with recipes that exploited new taste combinations such as lobster with curry mayonnaise, tempura eggplant with red onion relish, and tomato granite with pernod.
The 1990s and early 2000s saw an explosion of culinary innovation foreshadowed by visionaries such as Herve This and Michel Bras, and the increasing popularity of restaurants such as Ferran Adria's El Bulli and its emphasis on elaborations (i.e. increasing levels of abstractation using the original ingredient). While Adria himself shuns the term "molecular gastronomy" as being only one part of his culinary toolbox, other chefs - from Edward Voon in Singapore to Heston Blumenthal in the UK - adopted and modified these exciting new techniques in their never-ending search for new and more sophisticated methods of food preparation and service. It could be called "the chef as performance artist", with helium-filled balloons, iPods playing the sound of waves, wispy clouds of dry ice and colourful candy figurines appearing at the dining table. Jaded gourmands with palates accustomed to Japanese maccha, lingonberries and kaffir lime sought bragging rights through naming the most outlandish and elaborate dining experiences, and temples of fine dining sought to outdo each other.
Even then, towards the end of this period, the seeds of a growing reaction against flashy culinary pyrotechnics and "two peas and a smidgen of sauce" haute cuisine had been sown. The most sophisticated diners tired of sprinklings of crystallised violets or the finishing of beef dishes at the table in clouds of burning hay, preferring instead food, as one New York reviewer put it, that was "technically complex without being exhibitionist, highly refined without being effete".
This trend is now coming fully into itself. It's a promising melding of certain foodways: farm market sensibilities and "localvore" sustainability, more diverse culinary intermarriages, and a growing desire to return to something more simple and fundamentally true, a Michael Pollan-esque awareness of what we are eating, where it comes from, and what that means. In some ways it's a return to the natural, but with a highly deliberate intensity that is paradoxically stage-managed to the nth degree.
And this brings us, after some context-setting, to two meals I had recently at Momofuku Ko and Stone Barns at Blue Hill (SB@BH). For the avoidance of any doubt, both were extremely good, and I believe they serve well as minor revelations of things to come.
Both are fairly young restaurants - David Chang's Ko (March 2008) is a sparse and intimate 12-seater distinctively recalling a Japanese omakase sushi bar, the aesthetics reflected in the no-choice 8 course tasting menu for US$85. The restaurant favours younger, more tech-savvy diners through its online-reservations-only model with strict booking sequencings. With its Sunday 4 course farmer's lunch also at US$85, SB@BH (Spring 2004) infuses the farmhouse slow food model with a new inventiveness (diners at different tables are served different dishes even if both order the same tasting menu). The restaurant is a juxtaposition of equal parts elegance (starched white tablecloths and jackets recommended), enthusiasm (baskets of fresh veg, eggs, honeycomb and even charcoal are brought tableside to educate diners on the contents of their meal), and old fashioned common sense (the Barbers' tie-up with the surrounding Pocantico Hills working farm and education centre Stone Barns provides a great source of fresh farm produce).
What unites these seemingly disparate restaurants is an intense devotion to natural, artisanal ingredients, simply yet inventively adorned. Take Ko's serving of kusshi, small Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) cultivated in British Columbia, and amazingly flavourful and umami-infused black trumpet and Maitake (Sheep's Head) mushrooms from the East Coast. Chilled (yes, chilled) Hudson Valley foie gras was served in a refreshing pile of delicate shavings, on top of lychees and riesling jelly. One of the desserts featured a gorgeous ball of fried condensed coconut milk served with banana caramel and tasting for all the world like a coconutty goreng pisang.
BH@SB is a much more classic farm-to-table experience. Its chefs display total devotion to local cultivation enhanced by judicious hunter-gatherer finishes. Dishes feature seasonal roots, veg, fruit and flowers that were sitting in the soil earlier that morning, locally raised chickens, pigs, cows and deer, freshly hunted game and fish, and trimmings and garnishes (e.g. ramps foraged by the serving team and pickled for martinis). What they can't or don't grow they buy from other upstate New York farms.
A refreshing shot of dandelion and cucumber spritzer was followed by bite-sized tomato burgers, grilled zuchinni breaded with sesame seeds, warm crusty country sourdough bread, melon granite with Stone Barns pork face-bacon, and a dazzling salad of radishes, cresses, edible flowers, quail eggs and raspberries. Ingredients such as locally caught brook trout, Maine lobster and Berkshire pork were enhanced by light trimmings of fresh herbs and leaves (golden purslane, Galisse lettuce, peppery cresses), pulses, berries and nuts. Sauces were minimally invasive and brightened the meats and seafood without masking them. The petit four? A golden dripping piece of honeycomb straight from Stone Barns' own hives, which made a perfect complement to a slice of great chocolate cake topped with white cherries.
Stone Barns allows diners to complete the educational/sensory experience with a post-lunch stroll through the working farms or along the trails that lead further into the Pocantico Hills countryside, or with a fruit and vegetable tour for a nominal fee. Veg patches are well-signposted with educational facts and some feature a dazzling variety of species (e.g. the wild-looking patch where apple mint jostles merrily with ginger mint, pear mint, chocolate mint, Japanese black peppermint, spearmint and pineapple mint, and guests are invited to pick and taste leaves). Staff happily explain the agricultural philosophy of Stone Barns (closely derived from Eliot Coleman's writings) and discuss new farm projects like biochar (limited success), ethical foie gras (no success), and crop rotation (much success). It's all done with enthusiasm and verve, without any hint of pretention, by a young service team that appears to buy in totally to the organic, free-range, farm to table paradigm of eating.
And yet, strolling amongst the ripening blackberries, one realises that not everybody on the planet can eat this way - there's an artisanal, hand-picked Tarrytown gentility about this that commands a significant price premium, a far cry from the gritty realities of peasant farming discussed in such books as F. H. King's "Farmers of Forty Centuries" or Hu Shiu-Ying's "Food Plants of China". It's land-intensive in a different way: if everybody used 10 acres and 40 hardworking staff to serve about a hundred meals per day, we'd run out of arable land (and staff!) Yes, the understated country chic and localvore innovations playing out in intimate parlours like Ko and Blue Hill are heralds of a new fine dining trend. But given the constraints of time and space, such a trend is much more likely to remain within the rarefied confines of artisanal kitchens, rather than usher in a new age of mass local farming and eating.
